Ghana has witches, mostly women. It has witch finders. And it has some villages set aside for witches or suspected witches.
Sounds pretty horrible, and it sounded that way to Karen Palmer as well. The travel books for Ghana mention one such village, which she visited—and decided to study the situation in more detail. (She describes two villages, which have strikingly different problems.)
A chief was selected (by the ancestors, of course), for the post of witch seer. He doesn’t go out to find witches, suspected witches are brought to him for verification. The test (a fee is required) involves whether a sacrificed chicken dies on its back or its face—on its face means the woman is a witch who sucks the life out of people and kills neighbors and kin. A series of sacrifices and ceremonies can "de-fang" the witch, who will then allegedly be killed by angry spirits if she tries anything wicked again. But these are pricey, and even if they are carried out the woman is rarely welcome back in her village. Thus many women just stay in a village for witches attached to this chief’s domain and under his guard. They are farmed out to work for neighbors, or try to scrape together something to sell.
Sounds pretty abusive—the chief gets lots of benefit and the women lose everything.
But Karen studied the matter deeper, and found it not so easy to cure the problem as she’d hoped. For starters, laws aren’t very helpful. She described the history of the English attempts to deal with witchcraft, and found that it generally made no difference; depending on your point of view they may have sometimes made things worse. Second, the belief in witches is not something stirred up by witch finders, but endemic at all levels of society. True, men with "witch power" are almost admired, and there can be an arms race for jujus and counter-jujus, but everybody believes that some women are endowed with a special power, sometimes without their consent, that brings them into a sorority of night-traveling sort-of vampiric fireballs. (It can run in families, too.) Third, an accusation is deadly, even if you are vindicated. Some women, nominally cleansed, tried to go home and barely returned to the witch camp alive.
The witch village, oppressive though it is, turned out to be better than alternatives.
The other village she saw was simply a safe area, and not run by a seer-chief. The women there were even worse off. She interpreted the difference as due to the fact that the women in the first camp were supposedly under control of the seer-chief, and therefore could be safely employed, while at the second village the neighbors didn’t perceive any oversight and feared to buy anything the witches had made. So the witches lived off what they could glean from the land and food other people dropped.
Karen describes a visit to a sacred cave complex (which she didn’t enter), where everyone comes to deal with the spirits, and describes rather vaguely how her own attitudes toward fortunetelling changed—with some examples she found right on the money and others that were way off target. (She also inserts a few pages dealing with European witchcraft, which are largely incorrect.)
Her translators taught her more than she expected about the pervasiveness of the beliefs, even among Christians who believed God to be superior to demons. One secular source decried the Ghanaian treatment of witches, and said they should be harnessed and trained to provide an African equivalent to Western technology.
The stories of the women she is able to interview will stay with you. Some were accused by jealous secondary wives, one by business rivals, and one believes herself to be a witch and wishes she could stop the deadly dreams she has.
She comes back repeatedly to one factor, but does not suggest dealing with it: polygamy. If her descriptions are representative, a large proportion of the accusations come from strife between multiple wives. (She says all children are assumed to be those of the first wife! And wives who give birth only to girls are not much use.)
Read it.
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